TITAN POCKET

Smallest, Lightest and Toughest

Back to years from now there were QWERTY Keypad phones, No! Strike it out. Yes!! They exists even in 2021. Unihertz makes a bold move with its curvy new phone, a reinterpretation of a classic design that old-school smartphone fans definitely still carry a torch for. The Titan Pocket may leave you with some Qs as to why the company is working off such an old playbook, but there’s a niche group of keyboard fans who will find this to be a real pearl of a gadget.

QWERTY-keyboarded phones used to hold an immense spot on the lookout, and in people’s hearts. Before touchscreen phones got popularity, physical keyboards were the best way to input data, and still got their fans.

Unihertz specializes in quirky phone designs, like the tiny Jelly 2. Last year, it rolled out the Titan, a QWERTY phone that many people found unusably large: It’s 3.66 inches wide and weighs around 280grams. The Titan Pocket, on the other hand, is very close to the size of 2014’s BlackBerry Classic, though it’s still larger than the legendary BlackBerry Bold.

The Titan Pocket is a solid lump of phone. On the back, an “H” of metal surrounds soft-touch plastic. The top and bottom are rubbery. And on the front, there’s a perfect little keyboard surmounted by a 3.1-inch, 716-by-720 screen. That’s smaller than the BlackBerry Classic (4 inches) but larger than the Bold 9900 (2.8 inches). Unihertz says the body is “drop-resistant” but not water-resistant.

On specification side, It got 3.1 inch 1:1 display, 4000mAh power battery, Global LTE support and built in fingerprint Unlock, NFC

Unihertz loads its Android 11 build with a launcher called Quickstep, which has a simple 4-by-3 icon grid over four quick action icons. You can load another launcher.

Designed for Texting, Not Gaming

This is a $300 phone, so roll back your expectations accordingly. The Titan Pocket uses a Mediatek Helio P70 processor, which operates at around the performance of Qualcomm’s 600-series. There’s 6GB of RAM and 111GB of available storage; you can add a microSD memory card if you forgo dual-SIM use.

Benchmark results are what you’d expect from this chipset. Geekbench results of 299 (single-core) and 1426 (multi-core) are in the vicinity of a Samsung Galaxy A31 or A41. The Basemark web browsing score of 227.59 is surprisingly high because of the small screen, but it’s still below even high-midrange phones like the LG Velvet (302).

The less said about the 16MP main camera and 8MP front-facing camera, They are too disappointing, the results were too bad even in a good lighting situation and it’s better not to talk about the night shots.

Verdict

There’s genuinely nothing like the Titan Pocket. OnwardMobility’s supposed BlackBerry reboot has vanished into mists of mystery, the original Titan is unusably large, and the old BlackBerry Key2 series have hit end-of-life.

I think most people have moved on from QWERTY phones. Tactile feedback is indeed great, and touch screens are an artificial interaction. But the entire smartphone app world is now designed for a big-screen experience, so the Titan Pocket form factor only works for limited applications (mostly, messaging and web browsing).

That all said, Unihertz has clearly put love and thought into its resurrected QWERTY device. With a beautifully designed keyboard and dual-SIM support at a terrific price, it’ll make a very specific kind of person very happy.